The official Darwin Awards website runs that only those idiots whose senseless but beautiful death is documentary confirmed can take part in the competition. But it is not always so. That very story about rocket-car is still circulating in Internet as trustworthy, although it has already become an urban legend on the official site.

Many other sensational stories have also proved to be a pure invention. For instance, in 1998 the story about a German zoo keeper spread all over the Internet. He gave a large dose of laxative to an elephant suffering from constipation and then tried to clysterize the animal. At this very moment the purgative took effect, and the poor keeper was knocked down. He hit his head on the ground, fainted and soon choked with elephant faeces.

Many Russian editions still include a story about Friedrich Riesfeldt and his elephant Stefan in their articles about Darwin Awards. This tale was first published in Weekly World News in 1998. This American tabloid is known to fabricate most of its articles(for instance, Hillary Clinton adopted a little alien, etc). Meticulous specialists have already found out that there had never been any zoo in Paderborn.

Original source: http://english.pravda.ru/science

Used with permission.